Gerald Ford

I feel that I should depart at this point from my discussion of the pitfalls and opportunities of the Democratic victory, to address the eulogies being delivered and printed on the death of Gerald Ford.

I know that is a custom to never speak ill of the departed and to laud them in the most exemplary terms, so as to almost turn them into instant saints. I have always deplored this custom for when it comes to prominent men it is important that we not indulge in revisionist history, and assess a life as it was. Ford did some good things, and one can find those in any of the eulogies written, so the reader must forgive me if I do not repeat them here.

But I do find myself at odds with much that has been said and written about our “accidental” President though he was not so much accidental as the creature of his disgraced predecessor.

First we need to put the ascendancy of Ford into context. It was caused not only by the crimes of Richard Nixon but also by the crimes of Nixon’s Vice-President. The corruption of the Republican Party of today may well be nothing more than a continuation of the corruption of that period and even before.

Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was “allegedly” guilty of both bribery and tax evasion, crimes, which he had committed before Nixon chose him to be his running mate. Yet Agnew, like Nixon was above the law. Instead of being impeached and prosecuted, he was allowed to escape prosecution in return for his resignation. It was this outrage which elevated Ford to the Vice-Presidency, and he was chosen for that post by a man who had committed even more serious crimes, Richard Nixon, and here I am talking not only of the Watergate crimes but of the manner by which Nixon was elected.

First Nixon was aided in his first election by the treachery of Henry Kissinger, who, at the time, was considered a trusted ally of Johnson emissary Averell Harriman, leader of the Paris talks. Kissinger used his contacts with the Johnson administration to tip-off the Nixon camp about an anticipated breakthrough in the Paris talks. Nixon set out to sabotage those talks by secretly offering the South Vietnamese “more” than they would get from the incumbent Democrats. The result was the negotiations floundered, Nixon was elected, the war went on for more than another four years with untold American, Vietnamese and Cambodian casualties, and was then concluded on the same terms, and conditions as had been on the table in the fall of 1968.

The decision to pardon Nixon won Ford a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, acknowledging he had criticized Ford at the time, called the pardon “an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was truly in the national interest.”

I respectfully disagree. Nixon’s pardon did not end the nightmare for the nation and certainly not for Nixon’s subordinates. For years thereafter, Nixon’s subordinates were tried, convicted and many went to jail. They paid the price while the head of the conspiracy escaped and even managed to be rehabilitated.

Was the pardon an act of courage or was Ford taking care of someone who had been a close friend before, who had brought him to the Presidency and who remained a friend thereafter? Nixon’s crimes never even disturbed Ford enough to interfere with their continued friendship.

But what of the claim that Ford was a healer, a non-partisan statesman? He vetoed 66 bills in his barely two years as President. Congress overturned 12 Ford vetoes, more than for any president since Andrew Johnson. Does that sound like a man working with the opposition party?

One of the bills he vetoed was the Freedom Of Information Act one of the cornerstones of our Democracy today. That was passed over Ford’s veto.

Even though Ford in an interview released posthumously, criticized the Iraq war, he has to bear some responsibility for that fiasco, for he launched the careers of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even Scalia.

Some give him credit for an Amnesty program for Vietnam War resisters but it should be noted that the program was widely regarded as a failure, even by the people who administered it. Only 21,800 of the 350,000 eligible persons were granted clemency. It was left to Carter to grant anything meaningful.

Ford may have been virtuous and moderate compared to the present Republican Party, or to the Nixon or McCarthy Republicans, but he was hardly the paragon of virtue, which is the image now being evoked.

May he rest in peace!

Why This Is So! (continued III)

I concluded my last installment with, “Next time, how Reagan takes the Republican Party and the country to the right and makes this respectable, as Democrats have no answer and as the Union movement crumbles.

When the country elected Reagan I think few realized what a radical departure this constituted for the country. During all the years of Democratic ascendancy the Republican Party for the most part did not take serious issue with the direction the Democrats were taking the country. To be sure, there were many of wealth who looked upon both Roosevelts as traitors to their class and dreamed of undoing all that they stood for and all they had accomplished. But the Republican Party knew that such a position would be political suicide and so basically ran on platforms that only opposed Democratic reforms on the periphery. They argued that they wanted to do the same thing only they could do it better. They opposed some measures because ”they went too far”; they opposed others on the basis of defending states rights, they opposed others on the basis that they were too expensive and therefore fiscally irresponsible, but they never opposed the basic concept of the welfare state and that the government had a responsibility to provide a safety net, to protect the environment and to treat working people as something other than a component of industry to be treated no different than a widget. 

In other words they ran as Democrats light or as some dubbed it, “The Me Too Party. They did make some viscous attacks on Democrats, which in the short run did little damage but in the long took its toll. Beginning as early as 1947 they began a campaign to weaken the Labor movement when they passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto. They attacked Democrats as being, “soft on communism” and Joe McCarthy as the leader of the red baiting Republicans dubbed the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party, a label that has stuck to this day. They accused Democrats of having lost China to communism and being anti-defense.

At the same time they recognized that they had no intellectual base and while attacking intellectuals as eggheads, they systematically formed think tanks so that today right-wing think tanks outnumber liberal ones by a significant multiple. 

They vowed that newscasts would be more too their liking or they would buy them and in time all three major networks were bought by large corporations and they formed their own network and cable news channel, i.e. Fox. They took over radio as their propaganda organ.

But until Goldwater came along they didn’t represent a true alternative to the Democratic Party initiatives. Goldwater brought the party sharply to the right but in doing so he gave the Party an identity and a passion that it never had before. Goldwater was defeated in a landslide, but he gave the party passion and purpose, which Reagan inherited and exploited. This was not true of the McGovern candidacy, which only served to strengthen stereotypes of Democrats as being, in the words of Spiro Agnew, “effete.” 

At the same time the Union movement, which at one time had the almost universal support of the American people, was losing its image as the bulwark of all working people. At the height of the Union movement few people would cross a picket line. Unfortunately, the image of unions over the years, fairly or not, became of groups that supported featherbedding and had contempt for the public. This was exemplified by the by the strike waged by the Transport Workers Union in 1966, who went out on strike days before the new Mayor, John Lindsay, was sworn in and tied up public transportation for 12 days. Today unions are associated more with wealthy sports figures than with ordinary laboring people and union membership which reached its peak at about 35% of the total work force in 1945, declined to about 15% by 1995 and has held steady at that level for the past ten years. While the reasons for this decline are varied its effect on the Democratic Party and the progressive movement has been negative.

At least as important it appears that after Humphrey’s defeat by Nixon in 1969 The Democratic Party showed itself as a party that no longer had a real agenda. Whatever significant progress which was made thereafter was done by the Supreme Court (e.g. See Roe vs. Wade 1973) and the Democratic Party essentially became a conservative party fighting to keep the status quo, as a backlash against many of the achievements of the Great Society gathered steam.

Next: What Reagan did and what the Democratic Party should have done.